Creme Brulee French Toast (+ Video!)

Creme Brulee French Toast tastes like glorious Creme Brulee and can be thrown together in 15 minutes and made the night before for stress free breakfast and entertaining!

This Creme Brulee French Toast Recipe has a delicious golden caramelized toasted outside, is subtly creamy inside and seriously melt in your mouth delicious! I always make this Creme Brulee French Toast Casserole for special occasions like Christmas, Easter, birthdays, etc. because its always a hit and couldn’t be any easier!

Creme Brulee French Toast VIDEO

Do you like Creme Brulee?

For breakfast?!!!

How about for lunch?

Dinner?

Definitely dessert?

Now you can have Creme Brulee for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert with this ridiculously delectable Creme Brulee French Toast Recipe!

Ill be the first to admit that I usually never make breakfasts like these for actual breakfast. I’m more of a breakfast for dinner type person. In the case of Creme Brulee French Toast Casserole though, I guess its more like dessert for dinner. So that’s dessert for breakfast for dinner. I’m confused. The point is, with this French Toast, you can get your Creme Brulee fix any time of day. And believe me, you are going to want this every time of the day!

Ahhhh, Creme Brulee. Silky smooth vanilla custard with a thin crunchy carmalized sugar top. If its on a dessert menu, I don’t even look at the other options. I actually inhaled Creme Brulee last Saturday when we went out for my mom’s birthday. It felt like my birthday. When I saw a Creme Brulee French Toast Recipe in an old church cookbook months ago, I was immediately intrigued, so naturally I googled it and found that it has been done many times before – but never quite like this.

I made a few simple changes to the Six Sister’s Stuff version that resulted in OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD Creme Brulee French Toast. I eliminated the corn syrup, added maple syrup, added orange extract (to mimic the liquor flavor), flipped the toast after baking then broiled them to completely caramelize the top. When I actually shoved a mountainous forkful into my mouth, my eyes grew wide at how much it actually tasted like glorious Creme Brulee!

Let me tell you how that is even possible:

First off, making this French toast is SO EASY! Whip it up in 15 minutes, refrigerate, and then when you are ready to eat, pull your premade sheet out and bake. So fabulous for birthdays or special occasions like Christmas!

How to make Creme Brulee French Toast

First, melt butter and brown sugar together then smear it across a large pan…

Then you line the bread slices over top; then spoon a mixture of eggs, half and half, vanilla, maple syrup and orange extract on top of the bread. Simple and fast right? At this point you refrigerate the bread for 8 hours up to overnight. During that time, the bread slurps up all of the vanilla egg/half and half mixture like the picture below on the right.

When you can’t stand the anticipation any longer, sprinkle the saturated bread with cinnamon then bake for 25 minutes then flip the bread over and broil until golden.

Just look at that caramelized crust…

You now have a French Toast that has soaked up all of the brown sugar/butter/cinnamon on the outside, eggs/half and half/vanilla/maple syrup/orange extract on the inside to create a golden caramelized toasted shell giving way to a subtly creamy custard-like filling.

Creme Brulee French Toast tastes like glorious Creme Brulee and can be thrown together in 15 minutes and made the night before for stress free breakfast and entertaining!

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Prep Time

20minutes

Cook Time

30minutes

Servings

Ingredients

1/2cupbutter

1cuppacked brown sugar

1loaf 2 day-old French breadcut into 1” slices

5eggs

1 1/2cupshalf-and-half cream

2tablespoonspure maple syrup

1teaspoonvanilla

1/2teaspoonorange extract

1/4teaspoonsalt

cinnamon

Prep Time

20minutes

Cook Time

30minutes

Servings

Ingredients

1/2cupbutter

1cuppacked brown sugar

1loaf 2 day-old French breadcut into 1” slices

5eggs

1 1/2cupshalf-and-half cream

2tablespoonspure maple syrup

1teaspoonvanilla

1/2teaspoonorange extract

1/4teaspoonsalt

cinnamon

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Instructions

In a small sauce pan, melt butter and brown sugar, stirring occasionally until smooth. Pour melted mixture into a lightly greased jelly roll pan (18"x13"x1″), and spread out evenly over the bottom of the pan.

Arrange bread slices in a single layer to cover the pan (as many as will fit).

Add eggs to a medium bowl and beat for 1 minute, then whisk in half and half, maple syrup, vanilla, orange extract and salt. Pour or spoon mixture evenly over each piece of bread then lightly sprinkle bread with cinnamon. Cover, and refrigerate at least 8 hours, or overnight.

Bake uncovered at 350 degrees (175 degrees C) for 25-30 minutes or until lightly golden then flip all the slices of bread over and broil until the tops are golden.

Comments

Good morning, Jen! I have been making this french toast recipe not only as a Christmas Morning tradition, but for family members’ birthdays and my Granddaughter’s sleepover parties! Always a hit and always delicious. Thank you for sharing!

Christmas wasn’t just about what was under the tree but about this ridiculously AMAZING Creme Brûlée French toast!!! Thank goodness I double it because we couldn’t get enough. Had a little left for the next day and was just as GOOD! I made a raspberry sauce to go with. Not that this needed anything else , i just love raspberry sauce! 🙂 I think I’m going to add Orange zest next time. Definitely making this for our women retreat !!!! SOOOOO GOOD!!!! Thank you again for blessing us with your talent to create such yumminess! 🙂

Hi Therese, I am thrilled you made this French Toast for Christmas – so fun and I am thrilled you all loved it so much – yay!! And your raspberry sauce sounds divine – and with orange zest- out of this world! I hope you had a very Merry Christmas! xo

I’ve made this twice now and both times AMAZING! I did use 2% milk instead of 1/2 and 1/2 and it turns out fantastic. I also didn’t have orange extract, but used cinnamon oil extract instead. This blows any other french toast casserole out of the water. Really fantastic. My kids now request this for their birthday breakfasts. It really is special. Thanks for sharing!

Wow. I love creme Brule and haven’t made a french toast casserole in a while. This recipe looks so yummy. I’m curious if there is a reason why you add the cinnamon before baking. I’m afraid I’d forget to do it the next morning (menopause brain). Do you think I could just add it to the custard mixture instead?

Hi Leslie, it is spooned on instead of dunked so the bottom of the bread is completely in touch with the melted butter/brown sugar mixture on the bottom of the pan and better bakes to resemble creme brulee. Hope this helps!

I love creme brûlée and French toast so anxious to try this. I usually make my French toast using Peppridge Farms sweet breads like cinnamon swirl or brown sugar and cinnamon. Do you think recipe would work with this kind of bread or does it need to be crustier like the French bread to work?

Hi DJ, I am excited for you to try this too! I think this recipe could work with some sort of sweet bread but you would definitely need to dry the bread out first. I would bake the bread at 325 F for 20 minutes or so so it is almost crouton like consistency and then proceed with the recipe. Hope this helps!

I made this for our Christmas morning breakfast, and my family loved it! It was such an easy thing to prepare the night before/morning of. I usually have to get up extra early to finish prepping rolls of some kind, but it was nice that I could just pop the pan in the oven, and just make syrup to go on top. The prep the night before was easy, too. (I did make a homemade loaf of French bread which I made previously, and had put in the freezer.) This is a delicious breakfast that requires minimal work. I was wondering how crispy your French toast is on top. In your pics, your toast looks nice and crispy, and although mine browned nicely under the broiler, it wasn’t crispy. I’m just wondering if it’s really not supposed to be crispy, or maybe I should broiler them even more. Thanks for a great recipe!

Hi Kristin, my apologies for getting to your comment so late! I’m so happy this was a hit for Christmas with minimal work! As far as the crispiness goes, they do get pretty crispy. Part of this is due to how long you broil it and part of it has to do with how dry your bread is to start with. If you do want it crispier, simply broil longer. I hope that helps!

I made this a few weeks ago and it was amazing! So decadent and delicious. I’m making it again this morning but without the overnight soak, I hope it turns out!! Thanks for your incredible site Jen! You’re one of my favorites

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